The courts of Tanner’s Yard, by A Special Correspondent

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

This report appeared in a northern newspaper in 1849, during an outbreak of cholera, after the writer visited the poorest housing in an industrial town.

Behind the great warehouses of Canal Street, where the merchants of Hallerton store the bales whose price they settle every Tuesday on their handsome new Exchange, there is an archway so low that a tall man must stoop to pass beneath it. Few of the merchants have passed beneath it. I did so on Thursday, alone and unannounced, and I wish that every one of them had come with me.

The opening leads to Tanner’s Yard, which is not one court but five, each opening out of the last like the chambers of a rabbit warren. In the first stand fourteen houses, back to back, two rooms to each, and every room I looked into held a family, and some held two. There is one privy for the whole court. Beside it lies an open ash pit, into which everything is thrown, and which the landlord’s man empties, I was told, ‘when he remembers’. The water comes from a single standpipe at the entrance, and is turned on by the company for twenty minutes each morning. Those who are at work at that hour go without.

In the third court I went down seven steps into a cellar, where a weaver and his wife and four children live by the light of a grating in the pavement above. The floor was wet. The woman did not stop her work when I came in. She was winding bobbins for her husband’s loom, and she went on winding while she talked, because, she said, the bobbins would not wait for a gentleman. Her youngest child lay coughing on a sack in the corner, and when I asked how long it had been ill she looked at me and said, ‘Since we came here.’

I will not pretend that the inhabitants are all of them models of virtue. The gin shop at the corner of the yard does a brisk trade, and I saw two men there at eleven in the morning who had plainly been there since the night before. But I saw also a woman on her knees scrubbing a doorstep that would be black again within the hour, and a girl carrying water up two flights of stairs for a neighbour too old to fetch it. Dirt, in Tanner’s Yard, is not a choice. It is a condition of the lease.

The houses belong to a gentleman who lives at Harrogate and has never seen them. The rents are collected every Monday by his agent, who does not go beyond the first court. Seven people have died of cholera in the Yard since July. The Council has met three times to discuss the drains, and three times it has adjourned.

I ask the gentlemen of the Exchange to walk round to the back of their own warehouses. It will take them less time than it takes to settle the price of a bale.

“The writer blames the people who live in the courts for the conditions there.”

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